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PDC has come and gone, and Microsoft's identity landscape has changed. New products emerged, services appeared or underwent profound transformations: but the remarkable thing is that all elements, none excluded, are part of a single,company-wide, consistent strategy that aims at putting the user in control of his/her identities . Many words will be spent about those products, singularly and as a whole. After all, a lot of people waited a long time for this moment: I know I did. I can't tell you the joy of seeing this coming together so nicely in the last months! Here I'll just give you a short vademecum the various products and services we unveiled last week during PDC, without going too much in details. As you go through my little tourist guide, always remember my disclaimer. However in the interest of clarity, in case somebody would be confused by my little landscaping stunt up there ("omg he's out of control"), below you can find the official slide that was included in each and every identity session @ PDC and shows the breadth of our identity S+S portfolio. All of those technologies were described in Kim's & your truly's session , and they all had a role in the big demo in the same session . "Geneva" Server Ah, if I'd have a coin for every time I've heard conjectures about Microsoft eventually coming out with an "STS product", whatever flavor people gave to the term at the moment, I'd need a much bigger piggy and I'd sprout my very Read More...
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Greetings from the far New Zealand :-) this is a great place, I wish I'd have more time to look around. I compensated by spending a stupid amount of money in souvenirs (all bought in about 20 mins, so without much judgement (if ever)). Yesterday I had my session on Cloud & Identity, and in few mins I'll have the one about Zermatt. While I wait to get to the podium, I'm typing this quick post to point you to a brief video interview I had with the excellent Mark Carroll: you can find it on the TechEd Live pages. Boy, I sure gesticulate a lot :-) you know how the old saying goes: if you want to reduce an Italian to silence, just tie his hands! (BTW: happy Labor Day for ev'body in the US) Read More...
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Well, it's almost one month since I wrote the last " useful " posts : you would not believe how incredibly busy I am on stuff I can't talk about just yet (but soon, very soon). In this quick update I am excited to report that I am going to speak at TechEd New Zealand & TechEd Australia ! As strange as it may sound, the 114 flights I've boarded since I moved to Corp (October 2005) never took me under the equatorial line; furthermore, it's since first grade that I'm told how cool it is that New Zealand is at the exact antipodes of Italy, has roughly a boot shape as well, etc... that's the farthest place from home I can travel to without leaving the planet :-) I am going to deliver 2 sessions , both in NZ and in AU: Identity & Cloud Services (Architecture track, level 300) The shift towards cloud computing is one of the major trends in today’s IT industry. As resources and assets are increasingly hosted off-premise, traditional strategies for access control and identity management are proving incapable of handling distributed scenarios and cross-boundary communication. This presentation briefly outlines how architectures relying on claims-based identity management, security tokens and open standards can address cloud computing scenarios with the same ease with which they can handle traditional ones. The identity capabilities of Biztalk Services will be featured as a concrete example of an application of the new paradigm. “Zermatt” Developer Framework: Putting Authentication Read More...
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We are back! I hope you had fun with the STS tutorial I posted yesterday night ; here we move a step further and examine how to equip our STS with managed card issuance logic & UI. As anticipated, this is going to be MUCH faster. If you recall, in the last post I asked you not to delete the Default.aspx page that the new web site template created for you: we are going to put our card issuance UI there. At thsi point the visual studio project should look as follows: The only new element I added is the information card image information-card.png, which will be used as the background of the information cards we'll issue. Of course nothing prevents you to get all fancy and allowing the user to upload an image for personalization purposes, but here we want to be quick & dirty (well, at least quick ;-)). The little image is below, for your viewing pleasure. Time to add some UI. Let's open Default.aspx inn the designer and let's drag some controls. <% @ Page Language ="C#" AutoEventWireup ="true" CodeFile ="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits ="_Default" %> <! DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> < html xmlns ="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> < head runat ="server"> < title > Untitled Page </ title > </ head > < body > < form id ="form1" runat ="server"> < div > Managed Card Generator < br /> < br /> Card name: < asp : TextBox ID ="txtCardname" Read More...
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Just back from vacation. The tan barely started to fade, and here I am already playing with the new shiny toy :-). Did you experiment with Zermatt by now? As Kim mentions the samples (and the documentation) are an excellent way to start, and I am sure that blog posts & tutorials will soon start mushrooming here and there in the blogosphere: here I begin my humble contribution with my first technical post about Zermatt . I had *absolutely* no hesitations when deciding which scenario I should tackle first: an active STS which handles requests backed by smartcards . I received asks about from many segments (especially about eID management from governments and high authentication levels for finance) and pretty much from everywhere in the world (especially Europe and Asia): I am really delighted to finally have a chance to give you something about that scenario that you can compile in visual studio, as opposed to the usual whiteboard sketches :-) Before we dive into the code, let me disclaim the disclaimable: as usual, the code you see in this blog is just an example and is by no mean production ready code. My purpose here is to introduce you to new ideas, so I favor readability and clarity over completeness If you consider the definition of best practices as "A technique or methodology that, through experience and research, has proven to reliably lead to a desired result" , I think I can safely say that there are no established best practices yet. Sure, there are some fixed points Read More...
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Ahh, I’ve been looking forward for this post for a looong time. We just made available for download the bits of the Beta of “Zermatt” Developer Identity Framework . “ Zermatt ” is the codename of a .NET framework that helps developers build claims-aware applications to address challenging application security requirements using a simplified application access model. Let me expand a bit on that. If you want to develop applications that take advantage of claims & identity Metasystem goodness in general, Zermatt makes your life easier by providing base classes, controls but especially capabilities & a programming model that take care of most of the plumbing for you. Regardless of the role (IP, RP, subject) or the style (Active, Passive, “ Passive-Aggressive ”), Zermatt shields you from the sheer handling of protocols & tokens and provides you with a great model for externalizing your access logic. For my loyal readers and in general to whoever worked with tokens and cardspace in general, who stormed me with mails since the TechEd EMEA demo and even earlier: this means that we can finally retire historical samples like the SimpleSTS and the TokenProcessor class . Zermatt is a fully supported developer framework that gives you those capabilities and MUCH more. How much more? Below there’s a partial list of the goodies you get: · An HttpModule (the Federated Access Module, or FAM) that takes care of handling the token processing pipeline: fully extensible & web.config-urable, Read More...
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